This new post by Claire Laporte appears on the Health Affairs Blog in a series stemming from the Fifth Annual Health Law Year in P/Review event held at Harvard Law School on Monday, January 23, 2017.
Believe it or not, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare, or here, ACA) has intellectual property provisions. In addition to establishing mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges, the ACA also created a new pathway for the approval of biosimilar drugs, which are akin to generic drugs. That pathway appears in a corner of the ACA that has its own title: the Biologics Price Competition and Innovation Act (BPCIA). The BPCIA is rich with intellectual property (IP) provisions that are now the subject of litigation in the Supreme Court.
Background: Generic Drugs And Biosimilars
Many of us take generic drugs for granted, but we have them only because the Hatch-Waxman Act (1984) provided an abbreviated pathway by which FDA could approve them. Under this pathway, a generic drug could be approved based on the safety and efficacy of the branded drug, plus a showing by the generic that it was essentially identical to the branded drug. This pathway also included provisions by which generic drug manufacturers could challenge the validity of patents protecting the branded drug. […]
Read the full post here.
